With the growing popularity of online mobile games,
the network traffic generated by them accounts for an increasingly significant proportion of mobile Internet traffic; however,
the game’s traffic characteristics have not been well studied. To
understand more about such traffic, we analyze the network
traffic of 9 online mobile games from 3 genres, namely, first-person shooting games, role-playing games, and racing games.
Our results show that small payloads, high packet rates, and an
excessive number of pure TCP ACK packets incur high traffic
overheads. The payloads may have redundant content, which can
be properly compressed. Given the increasing number of pay-by-volume and throttling 3G/4G data plans, gamers may not realize
they are being overcharged due to such overheads. We also find
that the overheads can be reduced without compromising users’
gaming experience because the packet payloads are highly redundant. Furthermore, none of the UDP-based games implement
TCP-friendly congestion control, which suggests that the quality
of experience (QoE) provided by the games may be undermined
by the possibility of congestion collapse.